piano

Reig Verbena Organ No. 728 barrel piano roll (1950s – 1960s)

The Reig Verbena Organ No. 728 was a children’s 15-note barrel piano using a plastic barrel (or roll) and was made by Claudio Reig S.A. in Spain. The rolls are interchangeable, and instructions on changing them were provided on the back of the instrument. The instrument itself resembled a small piano, and was just 39 cm high. The barrel was 28 cm wide and offered four different tunes, selected by turning a cam that shifted the position of the barrel.

Despite being called an organ it was a barrel piano. This is different to a barrel organ, which is a form of pipe organ and this barrel piano by contrast used tuned steel rods. Turning the barrel caused the pins to move hammers to strike the rods, and in this case also percussion including cymbals and bells.

It’s not clear when this model of barrel piano was produced by Reig, but it appears to be the 1950s or 1960s.

Sources / Resources

PianoSoft 3.5-inch floppy disk (1985 – 2012)

PianoSoft 3.5-inch floppy disks were first used in Yamaha’s Disklavier range of reproducing pianos in 1985, but Yamaha had previously produced a player piano using 5.25-inch floppy disks in 1982. The Disklavier name combines the words disk and klavier, the German word for keyboard, and they were the same concept as player pianos that used piano rolls.

The first model to use 3.5-inch disks was the MX100R, introduced in Japan in 1985, and this was followed by the MX100A and MX100B in the US in 1987. These used double-density 3.5-inch microfloppies, and Yamaha’s proprietary MIDI format known as E-SEQ.

High-density 3.5-inch microfloppies were introduced with the Mark IIXG model in 1992, and the Disklavier now recorded in Standard MIDI Files (SMF) format. The Mark IIXG and newer models could read in both E-SEQ and SMF formats, but these should not be mixed on the same disc.

Older PianoSoft disks containing files in E-SEQ format cannot be read by a PC as there is nothing written on the boot sector of the disk. However, disks formatted on PC can be read in a Disklavier drive.

The E3 Disklavier was introduced in 2009 and this did away with floppy disks, but the Mark IV which was the last model to use them remained in production until 2012.

The name PianoSoft is still in use to describe the files containing piano performances that can be downloaded for use on newer Disklavier models.

Figures

Dimensions: 94 mm × 90 mm × 3.3 mm

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Piano roll (1883 – 2008)

A piano roll is a music storage medium used to operate a player piano, piano player or reproducing piano consisting of a continuous roll of paper with perforations punched into it. The roll moves over a reading system known as a ‘tracker bar’ and the playing cycle for each musical note is triggered when a perforation crosses the bar and is read. Rolls play at a specific, marked speed, where for example, 70 signifies 7 feet of paper travel in one minute.

The first paper rolls were used commercially by Welte & Sons in their Orchestrions beginning in 1883. The popularity of piano rolls peaked between 1900 and 1927.

The majority of piano rolls play on three distinct musical scales. The 65-note (with a playing range of A-1 to C#7) format was introduced in 1896 in the USA specifically for piano music. In 1900 a USA format playing all 88-notes of the standard piano scale was introduced. In 1902 a German 72-note scale (F-1, G-1 to E7) was introduced. All of these scales were subject to being operated by piano rolls of varying dimensions. The 1909 Buffalo Convention of US manufacturers standardized the US industry to the 88-note scale and fixed the physical dimensions for that scale.

Piano rolls were in continuous mass production up to 2008, being replaced by MIDI files that accomplish digitally what piano rolls do mechanically.

Metronomic or arranged rolls are rolls produced by positioning the music slots without real-time input, whereas hand played rolls are created by capturing in real-time the hand-played performance of one or more pianists upon a piano connected to a recording machine. Reproducing rolls are the same as hand-played rolls but have additional control codes to operate the dynamic modifying systems of the specific brand of piano it is designed to be played back on.